Curation on Google News

Mission & overall approach

The Google News Curation Team helps users follow a story or find a source anywhere on Google News. We collaborate directly with other teams that build and maintain Google News, enabling the development of features that support our product’s mission to be trusted, credible, and enjoyable.

The team focuses on 2 main areas of work:

Topic curation for major events such as award shows or sports championships, as well as general interests

Source curation within the Newsstand tab, generally organized by seasonal events and promotions

How it works: Topics

Based on empirical signals such as aggregate publisher activity and demonstrable user interest, we steadily identify topics and subjects that are generating attention. We define these topics broadly: they can be a major international event, the latest development in a personal interest, or anything in between.

For these topics, the curation team provides additional structure -- such as sub-topics (e.g. in the case of an award show, sub-topics might include movies that are finalists for receiving an award), related items, and more. Importantly, the team only defines a structure -- all topics and sub-topics are then algorithmically populated with content.

These topics are the sole instance of human curation within Google News. Curated topics can be found by searching Google News for related terms; they may also appear as suggestions in For You or Newsstand.

How it works: Newsstand

In select countries, the Newsstand tab contains promotions, featured content, and collections of sources around a given theme or event. Curators identify publishers for these promotions based on timing, the quality of the edition’s user experience, and relevance to the promotional theme. Read more information on Newsstand.

Additional information

Our curation activity is managed independently from other product or business teams at Google. The team is subject to Google and Alphabet Codes of Conduct, with particular attention to the sections on conflicts of interest.

The team does not create original content. All content indexed in Google News comes from publishers and content creators who already exist on the Web.

The team does not perform any reporting or gathering of any additional information.

The team does not actively review sources in the Google News corpus. If we encounter potential content violations in the course of our normal work, we notify our operations and policy teams accordingly.